Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his
inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited
memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before
Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a
turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated
and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the
war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog's mother took him and his
older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend
much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It
was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most
visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.
Until age 11, Herzog did not even know of the existence of cinema. His
interest in films began at age 15, but since no one was willing to
finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory.
He started to travel on foot. He made his first phone call at age 17,
and his first film in 1961 at age 19. The wildly productive working life
that followed--spanning the seven continents and encompassing both
documentary and fiction--was an adventure as grand and otherworldly as
any depicted in his many classic films*.*
Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record
of one of the great and self-invented lives of our time, and a singular
literary masterpiece that will enthrall fans old and new alike. In a
hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most
important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first
and only time.
